Against The Odds

With a quite respectable product to present, I set off around the world to start selling it properly. It was time spent away from designing, but it was to teach me, above all else, that only by trying to sell the thing you have made yourself, by dealing with consumers' problems and the product's failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done, to bond with your invention and to improve it. Conversely, of course, only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others, and demand a heavy price, with all his heart.

My big mistake had been presenting the same craft to each customer and telling them: 'This can be adapted to suit your needs' If someone wanted a diving boat I would explain that it could be fitted with compressors, heaters and a very slow diesel engine. If an oil company wanted a crew bus, I would tell them that suitable seating and a faster engine could be fitted. To the military I said I would bullet-proof the sides and engine. To constructors in search of a bridging tug I said, 'Special buffers? High power engine? No problem.' I convinced not a single one of them.

The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it. It didn't matter if it could be done better. The Ballbarrow was not the only way to make a wheelbarrow that didn't get stuck in mud - but it was a way. The trick is not to keep looking over your shoulder at others, or to worry, even as you begin a project, that it is not going to be the best possible example of its kind. As long as it works, and it is exciting, people will follow you.

Like Brunel, Jeremy Fry did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through pages of calculations; he didn't argue it through with anyone; he just went out and built it. as far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible. It was mind-blowing. No research, no 'workings', no preliminary sketches. If it didn't work one way he would just try it another way, until it did.

i suppose it was here that I learnt the crucial business principle that would guide my later attempts at making money from invention: the only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new, that has style value as well as substance, and which they cannot get anywhere else.

in art you place yourself at the mercy of human judgement and its odious courtiers, human error and human weakness. in engineering and design you are at the mercy only of natural law (physics) and the market (both development capital and income generated by response to the product). they are cruel task masters, but at least they are visible ones. the artist is equally enslaved to the market - the industrialist is just more honest about it.

it is in our engineers that we should place our greatest faith for the present, in that they determine the way our future will be. while novelists, painters and poets are making craven images to the present, ossifying it, offering to the future only ways of remembering, the engineers and inventors are determining how the future will work.

the many people i have offended have considered me arrogant, rude, stubborn and solipsistic. now, with a hindsight that proves i was right, those faults of mine seem less criminal. and perhaps that is the nature of 'vision': when all has come right, the kind of man who persisted despite constant ridicule from the controlling forces will be said to have possessed vision. by which I am led to the belief that, in the case of inventors, for 'vision' one might equally well read 'stubbornness'. at any stage in my story where I talk of vision, and arrogance seems to have got the better of me, remember that I am celebrating only my stubbornness. i am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule.